NEW HOPE FOR AN OLD PROBLEM: A FAMILIAR SYNDROME
Posted by adminHarry probably sounds familiar to you, and so do his complaints. It has long been an item of popular wisdom that forty is a difficult age for a man, and an age when he also makes life difficult for others.
You may have seen men like Harry on TV programs about male menopause, or read about them in articles on the same subject. Or perhaps you’ve encountered such men in movies like Scenes from a Marriage and Carnal Knowledge and Save the Tiger; or in books like Joseph Heller’s Something Happened and Alison Lurie’s War Between the Tates.
Maybe Harry reminds you of someone you know—a friend or colleague. Your husband or lover.
Maybe you even feel like Harry yourself.
If not, take another look around you. You’ll discover that a great many men start behaving strangely sometime in the middle of their lives—doing things they never thought they’d do and asking questions they never imagined grown men had to ask. This is the time when careers nosedive, affairs flourish, and marriages flounder or fall apart. Such events are only the tip of the iceberg.
Arriving at the brink of middle age is like being stranded in a foreign country: With few guideposts to direct him, a man feels disoriented by the unfamiliar terrain and the multiple changes jarring his psyche. Suddenly the past seems a humiliating reminder of risks untaken, women unconquered, and chances ignored. And the future seems to be hurtling toward a dreaded rendezvous with old age and death. Meanwhile, responsibilities are mounting and physical energies are ebbing. Children are rebelling or departing, wives becoming assertive and demanding, and parents falling ill or dying. Younger men are scrambling up the work ladder, and job options are shrinking.
With so many altered horizons, a man begins to feel as if he’s lost his focus on things. Outward circumstances and inner stirrings now clash in a new way—-and something disquieting starts happening.
Most of us will recognize the more common symptoms of mid-life turmoil.
This is the time of life, for example, when a man begins to worry about his body. Suddenly he suffers from prostate troubles and pulled muscles. Suddenly he needs glasses or root canal work. His cholesterol count goes up, his energy level down. His body is less reliable on the tennis court, less resilient under stress. He can no longer work such long hours or travel at his usual hectic pace.
He finds it maddening, this loss of control. He feels that his body has betrayed him.
High blood pressure develops and so do ulcers. Psychosomatic illnesses erupt: A man is suddenly beset by chronic fatigue, acute indigestion, mysterious backaches, painful joints, and migraine headaches. He complains a lot or even becomes hypochondriacal, convinced that every cold is the forerunner of pneumonia, every pain the sign of cancer, and every rapid heartbeat the precursor of a coronary.
Often he panics over his sexual performance and suffers from bouts of impotence. He may become lethargic about sex and cut down his activity. Or do just the opposite, pursuing new sexual conquests with a vengeance. He jokes about sex compulsively, develops a sudden interest in X-rated films, or brags outrageously about his exploits.
To confirm his sexual appeal he may try to regain a youthful image by changing his appearance. He grows a beard or mustache, gets his hair styled or dyed. He buys a toupee, undergoes a hair transplant, or gets rid of his wrinkles and jowls by plastic surgery. He may also change his style of dress:
•A conservative executive trades his dark suits and striped ties for velvet jackets and turtlenecks.
•A diffident accountant becomes a weekend hippie, transformed by French jeans, a shirt slit to the navel, and chains around his neck.
•And a quiet dentist switches to suede jumpsuits and platform shoes.
Habits change, too. A man suddenly becomes serious about dieting or exercising. He gets into Transcendental Meditation, Arica, or EST. He gives up smoking cigarettes, tries marijuana instead. A sedentary lawyer becomes a tennis or jogging enthusiast. A teacher takes up skiing or backpacking. And a salesman goes off to shoot the rapids, hunt deer in the wilds, or learn how to pilot a plane.
Sometimes a man makes a wildly impulsive purchase, treating himself to a luxury item he’s dreamed about since youth:
•A newly divorced engineer spends thousands on a racy red sports car, despite his tardiness in meeting alimony payments.
•And a store manager who is still struggling to pay off the mortgage on his home splurges on an eighteen-foot cabin cruiser.
This is the time of life when a man often starts behaving in oddly uncharacteristic ways. He ignores his wife and screams at his children. He complains of boredom and fatigue, insisting his life has no meaning. He becomes increasingly detached, withdrawn, and introspective.
He drives himself relentlessly at work, snapping at his colleagues and staying at the office later and later. Or he abruptly loses interest in his job, taking longer lunch hours, forgetting appointments, and dawdling rebelliously over deadlines. The man who was generally calm and easygoing now becomes a demonic whirlwind—always busy, always traveling, always overscheduling himself. Another man, previously cheerful and boisterous, suddenly turns morose and moody. He can’t take a joke anymore, hardly laughs at all.
Weekend patterns change, too. The former sportsman and devoted father now sulks in front of the TV, retreats to his basement workshop, or falls asleep at peculiar hours. When his wife suggests a local movie, or ice skating with the kids, he glares at her reproachfully. And the contemplative man who always relished solitude now fills his weekend with activity—squash, handball, poker, backgammon, anything involving people. Urgently gregarious, he suddenly wants his wife to entertain more, too.
This is also the time of life, as most of us certainly know, when a man is likely to develop lascivious urges. Marriages shake, and sometimes shatter, as men in their forties counter boredom or bickering in the connubial bed with sexual conquests. Suddenly susceptible to erotic adventures, they try everything from intense flirtations to casual liaisons to consuming love affairs. The outcome varies:
•A country preacher refrains from acting on his sexual desires for a young widow with whom he has become enamored. But when he lunches with her weekly he feels terribly guilty nonetheless.
•A timid chemist initiates a furtive affair with his lab assistant, after years of resisting her seductive glances. Six months later he stuns his wife by demanding an immediate divorce.
•A stockbroker begins flirting slyly with the girls in the office, and then graduates to a full-fledged affair with a former high school sweetheart. Unwilling to abandon his children, he settles for a double life instead.
•After years of casual promiscuity, a TV celebrity leaves home because he’s found true love at last. One year later he pleads for a reconciliation, confessing that he misses the kids, the dog, and the Sunday barbeques.
. Whatever the consequences, mid-life infidelities often involve much younger women, in part because the firm flesh and innocent eyes of nubile girls are particularly enticing to men who are anxious to retain their grip on youth. Such romances may be brief and fanciful, just a rejuvenating interlude, or they may deepen and endure. But in recent years it has become increasingly common for men in their forties to remarry a woman many years their junior. Very successful men especially often flaunt a beautiful young wife like another badge of merit. And a symbol of potency. Today such men are more admired than scorned, and we are no longer so shocked as in the past if:
•A publishing executive who claimed his was the perfect marriage leaves home for a copy editor younger than his daughter.
•A television producer who has just bought a lavish apartment suddenly gets divorced to marry a girl who looks exactly like his wife, only twenty years younger.
•And a travel agent who always seemed devoted to his family divorces to marry an ingenue actress he met only two months before.
Newly critical of themselves, their families, and their whole mode of living, men in their forties often entertain dreams of dropping everything—or dropping out. Some fantasize about living in the wilderness, or on a tropical island; others lust for life in a commune, aboard a ship, or on a farm.
\nd then there are those who do more than dream. Rather than simply switching women, they change their goals, their careers, and sometimes their entire way of life:
•Tired of the rat race and urban pressures, a corporate executive gives up his high-paying post and moves his family to a farm in Montana, planning to raise sheep.
•Intent on becoming a commercial illustrator, a mid-western car salesman goes to night school, eagerly anticipating the day he can begin a new career in New York City.
•Fed up with the politics of academic life, a biologist abandons his teaching and sells some stock in order to write the comic novel he has been dabbling with for years.
•And a reporter resigns from his newspaper job so that he and his wife can sail to the Caribbean on the forty-foot schooner they’ve just bought with their life savings.
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